MULTI-PARTY USER AUTHENTICATION SCHEME FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

　　Over the last few years, a number of user authentication schemes for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been proposed with great intensity. In this paper, we propose a multi-party user authentication scheme for WSNs based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). In the proposed scheme, a group of N users can construct a (t1, N)-threshold multi-party user authentication scheme by incorporating Shamir's secret sharing method. Any set of t1 (for threshold) or more users can together reconstruct the group's secret key for accessing the sensor data but no set of less than t1 users can. Moreover, the proposed scheme not only deals with authenticated queries involving multiple sensor nodes, but also achieves mutual authentication and key agreement between users and sensor nodes. The proposed scheme still works well even if the adversary captures t2 nodes out of n nodes in WSNs. Our analysis shows that the proposed scheme is immune to some of the most notorious attacks and is suitable for WSNs.